ptx-linker 0.9.0

NVPTX modules linker
docs.rs failed to build ptx-linker-0.9.0
Please check the build logs for more information.
See Builds for ideas on how to fix a failed build, or Metadata for how to configure docs.rs builds.
If you believe this is docs.rs' fault, open an issue.
Visit the last successful build: ptx-linker-0.2.1

Rust PTX Linker

Build Status Build status Current Version

LLVM NVPTX bitcode linker for Rust 🔥 without external system dependencies 🔥!

What's going on in v0.9?

The release is important for the linker and existing users. The former approach was using an external nvptx64-nvidia-cuda json target specification and xargo to automatically compile libcore.

As of 2019-02-06 Rust received built-in support for building the CUDA kernels, and which evolved from the experience gained with ptx-linker prior v0.9.

Currently, it's possible to jump into a CUDA development with Nightly Rust:

# Install the minimal required version of the linker.
$ cargo install ptx-linker -f --version ">= 0.9"

# Install `libcore` for the CUDA target.
$ rustup target add nvptx64-nvidia-cuda

More details about further usage can be found below (Advanced usage section).

Purpose

The linker solves several of issues mentioned in the NVPTX metabug:

  • Non-inlined functions can't be used cross crate - rust#38787
  • No "undefined reference" error is raised when it should be - rust#38786

Convenient usage

Heads up! More details are coming soon!

At the moment ptx-builder is still using a legacy approach with xargo, but the situation will change very soon!

Advanced usage

Alternatively, the linker can be used alone.

Make sure you are using a cdylib crate type (the step is needed to perform the actual "linking"). Add to your Cargo.toml:

[lib]
crate_type = ["cdylib"]

And finally, build the PTX assembly file:

$ cd /path/to/kernels/crate
$ cargo build --target nvptx64-nvidia-cuda --release

Rust will involve ptx-linker under-the-hood and the latter will write the assembly at:

target/nvptx64-nvidia-cuda/release/KERNELS_CRATE_NAME.ptx

How does it work?

The linker does the magic without external system dependencies (mainly, LLVM libs) installed. Thanks to the rustc-llvm-proxy the correct LLVM symbols are being loaded at runtime. The approach also ensures that the linker uses same libraries versions as Rust.

Windows users!

Unfortunately, due to rustc-llvm-proxy#1 MSVS targets are not supported yet.

You might face similar errors:

Unable to find symbol 'LLVMContextCreate' in the LLVM shared lib

For now, the only solution on Windows is to use GNU toolchain.